Rational Anthem by Casey Thayer, a finalist for the 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is now available. Thayer’s collection was selected for publication by Patricia Smith.
In a voice at times electrified by caustic cynicism, at other times stripped bare by grief, Casey Thayer’s Rational Anthem offers wry tribute to “the greatest country God could craft with the mules he had / on hand.” In seeking to tell the story of the ragged world around him, Thayer examines the links among flag-waving populism, religious fervor, and toxic masculinity. Here male intimacy—among childhood friends, between father and son, and in the tenuous bonds between young adults—generally finds acceptance only when expressed through a shared passion for guns and hunting: “I helped my father clean his hands with field grass, / convinced we had shared a moment / in rolling the internal organs out of the abdomen.”
In “How-To,” the book’s closer—a mash-up of instructions from active-shooter trainings attended by the poet—Thayer grasps at strategies for surviving a world where we have come to see school shootings as routine: “Grab a textbook, they instructed my child, and hug it to your chest over your heart.”
Formally deft and lyrically dense, Rational Anthem asks why we find it so hard to change the stories we keep repeating.
“Casey Thayer’s Rational Anthem tangles with the multi-fisted specter of masculinity,” writes series editor Patricia Smith, “yet veers into tenderness and insight with a deftness that startles. It’s a book of sharp, unforgiving edges and truths unveiled—all crafted with a canny lyricism that makes those truths shine new.”
Casey Thayer is the author of Self-Portrait with Spurs and Sulfur and Love for the Gun. His work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago.
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.